A Corner of Europe Frozen in Time

About an hour’s drive south of Lithuania’s capital city of Vilnius, the country’s narrow panhandle, locally known as the “appendix,” starts to push into the countryside of neighboring Belarus. The joke in Lithuania is that, while drawing the borders of the region, Stalin set his pipe down on the map—no one was brave enough to move it, so improbable borders were drawn around its perimeter. But while the boundaries between Soviet republics were fluid, today this sliver of Lithuania, known by the name of its largest town, Dieveniškės, is separated by security fences from Belarus, with its entrenched Soviet ways, and by awkward geography from the relative progress of the rest of Lithuania. With its scattering of tumbledown villages, many of whose residents speak a mix of Polish and Belarusian, the region lives according to its own rhythms.

The German-American photographer Jasper Bastian captures this peculiar state of isolation in his series “A Road Not Taken,” which he shot during several visits to Dieveniškės last year. The project, which is ongoing, focusses on small towns bisected by the international border, which is open only to visa-holders. Although Lithuanian citizens who live near the border have access to special travel visas, many can’t afford them, and so are cut off from family members on the other side. Residents hunker down and make do amid rolling hills and uneven forests that Robert Frost would probably find familiar.

Bastian, who is based in Dortmund, Germany, likes to work slowly—he told me that shooting film has a “decelerating” effect—and this comes through in the series’ contemplative portraits and landscapes. In one photograph, smoke from a burning farm seems to sit on a cold field; another forces us to notice the density and depth of ruts in a dirt road. One of the most powerful images shows a man in a blue tracksuit pulling a wooden scythe through a farmyard’s high grass; light from the long Lithuanian summer dusk fills the trees. The scene is a painterly idyll. But Bastian, who won Magnum’s prestigious “30 under 30” award in 2015, has a background in photojournalism, and even his most artful portraits move a story forward. Take one of a local named Stanislav, shown in a jacket and cap astride a horse: the border he cannot cross runs through one of his potato fields.

“Time appears to be stagnant here,” Bastian has written of Dieveniškės. A few years ago, I travelled through the area with some Lithuanian friends and we all felt the same sense of stillness. The region seemed to us less frozen in time than frozen across all times—a cross-section of Lithuania’s patchwork political history. We saw abandoned wooden farmsteads and synagogues, Polish signage, an old man by the side of the road with Nazi Reichsadler hand tattoos. At the ethnographic museum, we marvelled at an ancient-looking moonshine still that had, in fact, only recently been confiscated by police and donated. A place such as this defies more than borders.

Michael Casper is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of California, Los Angeles.